Days of Future Passed in Here Be Dust

Recently I enjoyed time on my front porch – listening to a virtuoso mockingbird, watching a young anole (lizard) in my hedge, and reading.

I am thrilled to be reading books again. Chemo had curtailed that activity; I simply did not have the concentration for it. Neither did I have the energy to invest in the drama and emotion of fiction in particular.

Fifteen months before my diagnosis I had read Dr. Robert W. Prehoda’s futurist treatise, Your Next Fifty Years, published in 1980. Thanks to Open Library, I had downloaded the ebook edition to read on my Kobo Mini.

While sitting on my porch the other day, I read two other futurist works, alternating chapters from each. For the first time (and thanks to Project Gutenberg), I read T. Baron Russell’s A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist, published in 1905. The other book is Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, which I had first read when it was published in 1970, the year I turned 12.

Having finished with the Russell, I have turned to Edward Bellamy’s 1888 science fiction novel, Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 and am alternating that with the Toffler.

It’s a fascinating and at times heartbreaking experience. Fascinating in that some of the writing is on the nose one moment, and in the next breath the predictions are way off-base. Heartbreaking when those predictions rest in idealized views of human nature, resulting in a tremendous gap between assumption and reality. (I see this especially in Prehoda and Russell.) Re-reading Toffler is a bookend type of experience for me; I can compare the understanding I’d had as a child envisioning the future with my sensibilities and experience 45 years later.

I become keenly aware as I read that I am as trapped in my present day as much as the writers had been at the time of publication. (Prehoda died in 2009. Toffler is still living; I have yet to read The Third Wave and Powershift, his sequels to Future Shock.) I am trapped even when it comes to my own backward-looking, because it is easy to take innovations for granted once they’ve spent time in the mainstream. Without a second thought I turn my Kobo on and read Russell’s prediction of rudimentary calculators by the year 2005, side by side with his prediction of a cousin to Skype, maglev trains – and maglev ocean liners controlled by energy beams from the shore. I must work to remember what my life had been like pre-Internet, pre-computer, pre-audiocassette, pre-color TV, pre-pushbutton phone. (I still have an old rotary phone, along with other relics.) And that’s the easy part.

“The future” takes on a new layer of meaning for me, first as a natural result of ordinary aging, then with the effects of cancer diagnosis and treatment added on. There is no telling what lies around the bend, whether that applies to an individual, to societies, or to the planet. Trends and probabilities carry us only so far. An anomaly can generate a whole new string of events – and anomalies have as much to do with human behavior as with phenomena outside ourselves.

Not for the first time, I imagine myself sitting down with my 12-year-old self and showing her the marvels of her future, which are second-nature to me. I am 11 years older than her mother, a fact that in itself generates a whole new train of thought.

I imagine saying, “When you are 55 years old you will be diagnosed with breast cancer. With the help of your computer, you will read medical articles and research. You will share messages with people from all over the world, including video chats, all while sitting at your desk at home. You will have a device implanted under your skin and linked to your jugular vein that will help with chemo. You will get a special kind of radiation that will help protect your heart. You will take a pill that is designed to stop cancer at the molecular level. You won’t own a flying car by that time, and there won’t be a colony on the Moon or on Mars, but you will have this. And when you go to chemo, you will listen to music on a device that is about one-fourth the size of one cassette tape and that can hold the music of all your cassette tapes, LPs, and 45s, combined.”

Who could have predicted?

The wrong guesses I read give me a degree of comfort. Uncertainty can be harrowing, but it can also be cause for hope – because one never really knows.

I didn’t get a good shot of the little anole in my hedge, but a larger one has taken up residence in my mailbox:

My Tinkerlab Sketchbook Challenge doodles continue. For the prompt, “Camouflage”:

For the prompt, “Weather” (based on my photo here):

More art pieces from the challenge are here.